User blog:Merricksdad/Options Menu Gets a Facelift
Today I spent a little more time working with some new options menu abilities. But mostly I just played with the visual display. The plain black menu and blocky white logo on top were so 1996 back when all the scriptwriters thought black was cool. Well, I like black, and I like dark colors, but truthfully, black is plain and is generally an eyesore when used as a display background. I appologize ahead of time for any of you that live in a dark cave and needed black as a background color to function...go get some sunlight before your Morlok leader comes back. So yes, I quickly refashioned the logo block and then moved directly onto making the menu display smoother. For one, you will see I switched the options menu color scheme to match that of this wiki theme template. Its not the best color scheme, but I do find it easier on the eyes than black and white. Yesterday when I was building the infinitely nestable sections, I ran into the problem of being lost in my own options menu. I closed a blue bar only to find I didn't immediately now what menu I was then in. It occured to me there needed to be gridlines to find my way back out, or deeper in. So today I added more visual pathing for the nesting menu elements than was originally available (which was nothing more than a 6 pixel indent). In addition to visible pathing through menus, it seemed like the install/upate links in some sections looked like just text. They weren't active enough to be even recognizable as a link, let alone anything button like. Now they certainly resemble some kind of button. This is just the beginning of my CSS customization. Tomorrow if I have time, I will be releasing revision 12, which already has updated ability to color green any entry designated as new. This greening now works on every element type and at any level from section all the way down to just the checkbox element. Related to this flagging of new elements, I think I will add a new element that creates a button with which the user can highlight an array of elements. Similar in function to the buttons in FVWM that select crops by crafting cottage, this button will only highlight those elements, thus keeping your options unchanged yet allowing you to find those crops you might need for a project. And yes, it will make first debut in the FarmVille Sidekick Testing. And one last comment: I am assuming with all the CSS changes that I make that everybody using the WM script is strictly using a mozilla based browser or one that uses exactly the same CSS structures. However, if any of you is having serious issues with the new options menu layout, please do let me know and I will look up your browser's css differences and see if I can add them in. I'd hate to make a script unusable for you just because I didn't like how it looked on my end. While I really make this script for ME, the fact that I am sharing it means its really a script for the community and I need to keep you all in mind. Category:Blog posts